/*
 * Copyright (c) 2000 World Wide Web Consortium,
 * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut National de
 * Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio University). All
 * Rights Reserved. This program is distributed under the W3C's Software
 * Intellectual Property License. This program is distributed in the
 * hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even
 * the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
 * PURPOSE.
 * See W3C License http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ for more details.
 */

package org.w3c.dom;

/**
 * <code>EntityReference</code> objects may be inserted into the structure
 * model when an entity reference is in the source document, or when the user
 * wishes to insert an entity reference. Note that character references and
 * references to predefined entities are considered to be expanded by the HTML
 * or XML processor so that characters are represented by their Unicode
 * equivalent rather than by an entity reference. Moreover, the XML processor
 * may completely expand references to entities while building the structure
 * model, instead of providing <code>EntityReference</code> objects. If it
 * does provide such objects, then for a given <code>EntityReference</code>
 * node, it may be that there is no <code>Entity</code> node representing the
 * referenced entity. If such an <code>Entity</code> exists, then the subtree
 * of the <code>EntityReference</code> node is in general a copy of the
 * <code>Entity</code> node subtree. However, this may not be true when an
 * entity contains an unbound namespace prefix. In such a case, because the
 * namespace prefix resolution depends on where the entity reference is, the
 * descendants of the <code>EntityReference</code> node may be bound to
 * different namespace URIs. <p>As for <code>Entity</code> nodes,
 * <code>EntityReference</code> nodes and all their descendants are readonly.
 * <p>See also the <a
 * href='http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-DOM-Level-2-Core-20001113'>Document
 * Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification</a>.
 */
public interface EntityReference extends Node
{
}
